Excerpt from A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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A bus with purple velvet curtains had pulled into the dirt parking lot, its passenger windows shot out. Leaving the trio of engineers, I went over to inquire, clambering up for a look inside. The driver told me it had happened in the early hours of the morning in Baghdad; US forces were on patrol and simply strafed the area.

The cameraman I had spoken to earlier ran over to check it out. He poked his head inside the bus but decided it was not worth filming. "This stuff happens all the time."

"That's true." The driver nodded sagely. "It happens all the time."

* * *

It didn't use to happen all the time.

Understanding how the invasion of Iraq led to such a chaotic civil war requires some knowledge of the nation's demographics. Iraq is composed of three main groups: Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, along with a patchwork of small minorities, some of whom have lived there for thousands of years. The two main branches of Islam, the Shias and the Sunnis, are no farther apart than Protestants and Catholics, which is to say, far enough. The Shia are the majority in Iraq (more than 50 percent, which would win any ballot-box competition), but Sunnis, Saddam Hussein among them, have traditionally held power. (Indeed, the broader Middle East—aside from Iran and Syria—has long been in the hands of Sunnis, who are nine-tenths of the world's Muslims.) Nevertheless, the Iraqi people lived mostly at peace with their neighbours. So much so that by 2003 nearly a third of the population had intermarried, and most major towns and cities were mixed.

Besides envisioning a peaceful outbreak of democracy once Saddam Hussein was toppled, Washington's war planners hadn't thought ahead. Brutal dictator though he was, what they failed to consider when they decided to remove him were the dire consequences commonly observed whenever a strong central power is removed without adequate civic institutions in place. In a diverse society that lacks such unifying structures, there are two tendencies when authority breaks down: a disintegration into communal groups and violence. When governments falter, people turn to anyone who can provide security and basic needs, by whatever means.

With Saddam Hussein felled by George W. Bush's invasion and regime change, Iranian-allied Shia were handed power, along with the Kurds; Sunni Arabs were sidelined, lumped together as if they hadn't also suffered under Hussein. Even worse, and with far-reaching consequences, were two orders issued by the Americans under their chief administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, a former ambassador to the Netherlands who had no prior experience in the Middle East—or any conflict zone for that matter. Taking instructions from a secretive Pentagon agency called the Office of Special Plans, Bremer purged Baath Party members from national institutions including schools, hospitals, ministries and corporations, firing a hundred thousand of the country's white-collar professionals, a Sunni-dominant class. He then dissolved Iraq's army, police and intelligence services, leaving half a million men trained in nothing but war suddenly jobless and afraid for their lives.

The purge amplified as Shia death squads began showing up after dark in Sunni neighbourhoods; torture chambers were run out of the Interior ministry. Before long a thousand bodies a month, most of them ordinary Sunni civilians, were piling up in Baghdad's morgues. Ex–Baath Party officials and ex–army officers were the first targets of the death squads and were first to flee the country, followed by the intellectuals and anyone who had worked for the US coalition forces.

Then, three years after Hussein's removal, came a devastating bombing that launched the civil war in earnest. In February 2006, the golden dome of an eleven-hundred-year-old Shia shrine was blown up in the ancient mixed city of Samarra. The bombing was blamed on an Iraqi al-Qaeda franchise, a new group of fighters from Iraq and surrounding Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia, bent on bringing down the Shia-led government. Later that year, al-Qaeda joined with other Sunni extremists to form the Islamic State of Iraq, the precursor of ISIS.

Excerpted from A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell. Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.